Tutorial Magazine Blog

It’s been about 60 days since I launched TutorialMagazine, and I want to take the opportunity to let you know what has happened in these first two months. I always find these types of posts fascinating when I see them on other sites, so I hope you’ll enjoy this!

Lets start off by looking at my google analytics stats since february.

I have to say I’m very happy with getting 31,000 visits in the first few months. I think the bounce rate of 48% is acceptable too.

When the site launched I had posted about 100 tutorials, so in the first few weeks I got lots of hits because people were going through all of that content.

I also got visitors by posting my site to several design news sites, like designbump and designfloat. After a while, the number of daily hits started to drop, as you can see from the graph.

I had good content but wanted more visitors, so I decided to make some compilations/roundups. I put together these four that gave me tons of traffic:

Especially the Photoshop compilations drew hits, and amazingly most of the traffic came from Twitter! A few awesome people decided to spread the word about my site via Twitter, and for that I am very grateful! You can notice the enourmous spike in the graph, and that was when someone posted a link on Twitter that got re-tweeted by others. It was quite amazing to look at the stats and see that there were 220 people online (even if it only lasted a few hours!)

Even though the traffic from the compilations hasn’t really lasted, after each spike I got an increase in RSS subscribers, which to me is an important measure of success!

The green line in the graph is the number of subscribers, it’s currently at around 225 and growing. If you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?

Monetization

I’ve experimented with adsense and buysellads to see if there’s any money to be made. Adsense hasn’t really been that lucrative, and the ads can be a little annoying. I don’t want ads to take away from the user experience. So far I’ve sold one ad at buysellads, from the wonderful tutcandy.com. I think I sold the first one too cheap, because they seem to be getting lots of clicks for very little money! If you’re interested, you can advertise on TutorialMagazine.com for only $10/month. (one hug from the editor included, offer good while supplies last) The ads will likely receive around 50k impressions in a month, so I think thats a pretty good deal!

Motivation

I currently feature over 300 tutorials, and they have been viewed almost 60,000 times! I feel great about having given people access to that many good tutorials, and it’s rewarding to hear from people that they find the site useful.

Thanks to everyone who has been contributing feedback and tutorial suggestions, I really appreciate it!

Please let me know what you think of the site (and suggestions for improvements) in the comments section below.

I’ve thought about starting an affiliate program, by that I mean it would be nice if I could pre-approve certain tutorial websites so that they could log in and submit their tutorials directly. There would have to be some kind of submission approval in place, but it would make it easier to get your content added.

I’ll probably add some sort of friends list soon (just don’t know where to put it, perhaps in the footer?) and who knows, you might be on it.

I finally got pageranked last week, and I’m happy to say I got 4/10.. was expecting 3/10
Thanks for your comment!